Jan Lukas. Broadway & Times Square, 1967. Museum of the City of New York.

By Morgen Stevens-GarmonThere is a statue in Times Square that stands on the north side of 46th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue; not the Father Duffy sculpture for which the intersection is named, but a slightly smaller work found to the south of the formidable World War I priest. This statue depicts the great American song and dance man George M. Cohan. Measuring a solid three feet taller than its subject did in life, the statue celebrates a man who composed, directed, produced, or starred in over 100 Broadway productions, making him the most prolific musical theater artist in history.

Food City: Four Centuries of Food-Making in New York By Joy SantloferW.W. Norton, 2016

Reviewed by Cindy R. LobelIn 2014, 16,000 New Yorkers held jobs in food manufacturing, according to the Economic Development Corporation. This figure represents a 16% increase from just five years earlier. Most of these employees are involved in small-batch production at companies like Mast Brothers Chocolate, McClure’s Pickles, and Brooklyn Soda Works. These businesses are part of the artisanal food revival associated mainly with Brooklyn but with outposts in all five of New York City’s boroughs. The resurgence of food industry in New York City is a recent phenomenon, related to the economic revival of the city since the 1980s. But the tradition of food manufacturing stretches back more than 400 years. In Food City: Four Centuries of Food-Making in New York, Joy Santlofer examines this tradition, tracing the history of food industry in New York City from the Dutch founding to the present.

Folk City:New York and the American Folk Music RevivalBy Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. CohenOxford University Press, 320 pp. (150 photographs) $39.95

​Reviewed by Christine Kelly

Peter Yarrow, of the legendary folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, sentimentally reflects on the urban roots of American folk music and its capacity to inspire social change in the foreword to this new book. According to Yarrow: “Greenwich Village was, in many ways, the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution in America. Remarkable breakthroughs were made... but none more so than in folk music. Folk songs reached people’s hearts, inspiring them to challenge the established societal norms and break with antiquity.” While scholars have long acknowledged folk music as the unofficial soundtrack to much of the nation’s mid-twentieth century social transformation, comparatively few have fully explored the unique conditions in and around New York City which offered an ideal breeding ground for the rise of the American folk music revival -– a unique movement that fused reinvented folk cultural forms with commercial gain and progressive politics.

Over the past ten years, superheroes and comic books have had a meteoric resurgence within American culture. Superheroes have leapt from the pages of comic books; they appear regularly in blockbuster films (The Avengers and The Dark Knight), television shows (Daredevil, Arrow, and The Flash), and theatrical productions (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark). Even non-superhero comics and graphic novels, such as Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, have achieved critical success and migrated to other mediums. Comic book conventions have expanded in scope and developed into pop culture extravaganzas that draw crowds of over 100,000 fans. Historians, philosophers, and literary scholars have also increasingly turned to comics as a subject of academic inquiry. Superheroes have become what legendary comic book writer and editor Dennis “Denny” O’Neil has termed “post-modern folklore.” Superman, Batman, Captain America, and others have, in effect, replaced “Paul Bunyan and mythic figures of earlier ages.”[1]

In October of 1912, a few weeks before the formal opening of Aeolian Hall, the New York Times announced:New York’s newest music hall, which is to harbor the concerts of the Symphony Society, the Kneisel and Flonzaley Quartets, and several other organizations, as well as a great number of recitals, will be opened this week. Aeolian Hall is on West Forty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The builders of the new concert hall have had in mind not only the establishment of a place where concerts could be heard to the greatest advantage, but also a temple of music . . . The stage is large enough to comfortably seat the largest symphony orchestra, yet so cleverly have the plans been laid that a single soloist can stand there alone without the large vacant space being apparent.​

This is the second in a series of posts about the New York Chamber Music Society. The first post explored the founding of the group. Future posts will look at the musicians in the group, its repertoire, and composers of the time. There will be a salon-style concert, commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the NYCMS’s first major performance, on December 20, co-sponsored by The Gotham Center and featuring the chamber music of Mozart, Bach, and Bax, plus a special piece written for the occasion. Email here for more information.

This is the first in a series of posts about the New York Chamber Music Society. Future posts will look at the musicians in the group, its repertoire, and venues and composers of the time. There will be a salon-style concert, commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the NYCMS’s first major performance, on December 20, co-sponsored by The Gotham Center and featuring the chamber music of Mozart, Bach, and Bax, plus a special piece written for the occasion.

By Lawrence R. SamuelAs Part 1 of this essay discussed, it is the 50th anniversary of 1964, and many of us are looking back at what was a seminal year in the United States, especially for New York. In many ways, the city would be unrecognizable today, as a scan of Hart’s Guide reveals. There were plenty of entertainment options to choose from in 1964 New York, many of them no longer around. The Palladium and Roseland, around the corner from each other, offered plenty of room for the most popular dances of the day -– the cha-cha-cha, the mambo, and the rumba. A few nightclubs whose popularity peaked a generation earlier -– Delmonico’s, El Morocco, and the Stork Club –- were still around, although the magic was clearly gone. New York was an even later night-town in those days; it was not unusual for middle-aged folks to stay out until two or three a.m. Dinner and a floorshow was a staple of classy entertainment. Eddie Fisher, Harry Belafonte, and Phyllis Diller were regular headliners at the Royal Box at the Americana Hotel, while Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Lena Horne, or Jerry Lewis might perform at the Copacabana on any given night. Sammy Davis, Jr. and Liberace frequently held court at the Latin Quarter, and one had a decent chance of seeing Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, or Ethel Merman gathered around Jilly’s piano bar just for fun.

By Benjamin P. Feldman It’s hard work being poor, impoverished in our ignorance of those who came before us. We walk New York’s streets, eat in its cafes, but turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the giants who once walked the earth. Every so often though, the past rises up, through the cracks in the Belgian-block paving stones Crosby Street is quiet now, right by Housing Works Bookstore and Café. Once it resounded with bravos and huzzahs… Standing at the cash register, I suddenly realized. I was in a place precious to me. I’ve been working on a biography of William Niblo, the once-famous tavern-keep and then creator of Manhattan’s best-known entertainment venue from its inception in 1828 until it closed almost seven decades later.

By Jennifer Fronc On September 28, 1912, George Francis O’Neill headed out to Marshall’s Hotel, a black-owned establishment that offered comfortable accommodations, delicious food, cold drinks, and hot jazz.Located in two neighboring brownstones in the heart of the Tenderloin district, Marshall’s Hotel featured live music and attracted throngs of fashionable New Yorkers -— both black and white -— every night of the week.Indeed, Marshall’s revolutionized social life for black New Yorkers, who began to abandon the older clubs downtown.According to James Weldon Johnson, by 1900 Marshall’s had become the center “of a fashionable sort of life that hitherto had not existed.”The “actors, the musicians, the composers, the writers, and the better-paid vaudevillians” congregated at Marshall’s; white actors and musicians also spent evenings there in the company of their black friends.Luminaries such as Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Florenz Ziegfeld, and W.E.B. DuBois all frequented the establishment.[1]In short, Marshall’s Hotel was not a gin-soaked, rat-infested, honky-tonk, but an important gathering place for New York’s black cultural elite.

Manhattanites have often seemed remorseful at having ignored their physical history, having treated it so callously. At the same time they have sought to accept change as an inescapable element of life in the metropolis. In Downtown: My Manhattan (2004), Pete Hamill writes poignantly of this experience: "The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same . . . Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects character itself."[1]